JNJ

In 1985 took my first job as a staff accountant with a $21,000 annual salary. Now I am over the same department that I was hired into and entry level staff accountants earn $56,500 per year. That equates to a 4.2% annual increase. Just as employees expect an annual raise, so do dividend investors.

A look at Warren Buffett's portfolio to see if the companies follow Benjamin Graham's requirements of the Enterprising and Defensive Investors as described in The Intelligent Investor.

Fortune's 2009 list of the best stocks to retire on has been released and we go through the first 10.

The 20 largest stock buybacks from the 1Q 2009 are listed below:

Have you ever read something then paused and said well that’s stating the obvious? Then upon further reflection realize what is obvious to you may not be obvious to others. This happened to me recently as I was scanning some retirement headlines.

Learn how to determine maintenance capital expenditure to get a more accurate FCF value.
JNJ, WMT and ATW used as examples.

Some investors believe that by concentrating on their best ideas they could generate the best returns. After all, it is much easier to be up to date on any developments on ten to fifteen companies, rather than focusing on at least 30 individual stocks.

If the goal of dividend investing is to find and buy dividend stocks that will continue to raise their dividends, it is not enough to only look at a company’s free cash flow . Many companies generate significant free cash flow, but often that cash is already spoken for in the form of debt.

Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle has not changed his tune as a result of the economic downturn. At the ripe age of 80, he is still preaching buying-and-holding domestic stocks and bonds, cheaply, in an asset allocation that’s appropriate for your age.

Some of my fellow dividend investors have accused Warren Buffett of being a closet dividend investor. I won’t quite go that far, but there is significant common ground between dividend and value investors. With that said, let’s take a close look at Mr. Buffett’s most recent 13-F filing with the SEC.

Jason Zweig discusses the current rally in "garbage" stocks. The article includes advice from Jeremy Grantham and also discusses the opportunities in Japanese stocks selling below net current asset value.

Dividend investors should not rely too much on the dividend income from a single stock or a single sector. In an ideal situation, in a portfolio consisting of 40 stocks, each security would have an equal weighting. In other words one shouldn’t have more than 2.5% in a single security at the end of his or her target period.

As a dividend growth investor, my goal is to generate a rising stream of dividend income. Thus I would have to be selective not only about picking individual stocks, but also about selecting companies from a variety of industries, countries and size, in order to avoid a widespread implosion in overall dividend income.

Over the last six to eight months, there have been several prognosticators saying the market has finally hit bottom. In most cases they were quickly proven wrong as stocks continued to decline. What’s an investor to do? When is the right time to start investing?

Dividend stocks have long been considered defensive stocks - those that you buy when the economy and the market go south. While everyone else is panicked about their portfolio’s decline, dividend investors see a downturn as an incredible buying opportunity.